Jeremy Lin May Be The Dumbest Harvard Grad Ever

Sorry for the harsh headline, but I’m having a hard time coming up with any other conclusion. While I haven’t checked the Harvard core curriculum lately, it must surely be light on math, psychology and logic, and completely devoid of Marketing 101. How else to explain the self-destructive actions of its most famous basketball alum, Jeremy Lin, who has taken the global phenomenon known as Linsanity and doused it with kerosene.

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

After last night’s decision by the New York Knicks to let him walk to the Houston Rockets, almost all of the analysis has focused on Knicks owner Jim Dolan. He faced a vexing dilemma, given the back-loaded contract offer from the Houston Rockets that would have forced the Knicks to effectively pay $50 million for Lin’s services three years hence. (My friend Howard Beck of the New York Times provides a useful primer here.) How do you weigh Lin’s basketball and marketing potential against a very small sample set (he’s started all of 25 games in his career) and also against not just what he would be paid, but the larger ramifications of his contract down the line? Given that the adjectives associated with Dolan, backed up a dysfunctional track record, generally include illogical, vindictive, paranoid and dumb (and because I’m a lifelong Knicks fan, I’m being kind), he’s predictably being ripped apart.

In the end, though, I’m more fascinated by the choices Lin made. Dolan will be rich and reviled no matter what he does. Lin may have signed a big contract, but he also just provided the folks at Harvard Business School with a brilliant case study how to cost yourself millions of dollars and scads of influence when you’re not looking at the big picture.

To review, the point guard’s scrub-to-star rise in February – Linsanity! -- has arguably been the best sports story of the year, played out on one of the biggest stages, Madison Square Garden. But the NBA’s complicated labor rules forced Lin to shop around his services in order to maximize his next contract with the Knicks. At first, he did so brilliantly, according to numerous reports, originally getting Houston to offer him roughly $5 million for his first two years of his contract (the maximum anyone was allowed), and then a $9 million balloon in the third year, with a team option for a fourth.

Various Knicks sources, including their coach, playing poker as deftly as a late-night drunk at Circus Circus, announced that they would match it, and that was presumably that. A global marketing machine would remain in the global marketing capital, as had been his goal all along, Lin just told Sports Illustrated.

And this where Lin flunked miserably. After the clumsy Knicks showed their hand, Lin and Houston agreed to add another $5 million to his guaranteed salary in third year – a true poison pill, since that extra $5 million would cost the Knicks an extra $20 million or so, courtesy of the NBA’s punitive new luxury tax, atop the effective $30 million bite they had already internalized.

I get why Houston did it. But why did Lin, as an equal party to the new offer, go along? I can only offer two theories:

Financial Certainty: With the revised offer, Lin guaranteed himself an extra $5 million in his pocket, three years from now. That’s serious scratch for a man who had been sleeping on his brother’s couch earlier this year. And given legitimate worries that he was way overperforming during his magical 25 game coming out, taking the sure thing now makes some sense.

But why structure it in a way so punitive to New York? If it was all about certainty, Lin could have instead tried to guarantee that fourth year (or even a fifth year). At $9 million per, that’s way more downside protection, yet spreading it out in a way that didn’t push the Knicks toward the fiscal cliff.

As for the upside, forcing the Knicks to even consider ending his tenure in New York is the truest definition of Linsanity. If Lin is even 80% as good as he showed in flashes last season, fronting a very good, very hyped Knicks team had the potential to bring him tens of millions in endorsements. But as Steve Herz, who cuts celebrity endorsement deals as president of IF Management previously told my colleague Tom Van Riper: “Lin leading the Charlotte Bobcats back to respectability wouldn’t be that interesting. It’s not something that Coca-Cola is going to play $10 million for.”

Insert “Houston Rockets” into that sentence, and you get Lin’s new reality. Rather than the golden boy on an obsessed-over team in the world’s media capital, he’s now an above-average player on a below-average team in a low-profile city.